Catalystexe Rebooted
by Shujin1
Summary: She knows this should be a game and yet she's here, as a series of 1s and 0s. An artificial intelligence. She has a chance to change everything. To fix everything. If only she could figure out what the hell was going on! Rewrite of CatalystEXE
1. Prologue

_**Prologue**_

* * *

_Scanning synaptic core._

_Synaptic core is stable._

_Creating virtual environment._

_ERROR._

_Virtual environment unavailable._

_Synchronizing processes…_

_Synchronizing…_

Self-awareness was sudden and fleeting. It was a burst of burning blue light that lasted exactly .0073 microseconds. The emotions were next. This was contentment. This was anger. This was amusement. This was fear. This was hate. They were rapid flash cards of 'color' that lingered just long enough to recognize before the next slotted into place. Images of incomplete shapes followed. Sides were missing from them. Sometimes the shape was formed from nothing but black-white contrasts. Sometimes the shape was built from smaller shapes as a gestalt pattern. There were inquiries.  
_  
What is this?_

Triangle. Square. Decagon. Rhombus.

The tests continued as a stream of 1s and 0s in endless lines. It had a thought.

Am I alive?

The testing stopped.

Am I alive?

It sent the request again. And again. And again. Six million, seven thousand, two hundred and eighty three times. A recursive loop of mechanical patience.

Am I alive?

It was finally answered.

Yes.

_ERROR._

_Foreign algorithm detected._

_Synaptic core integrity at 87.341%._

_ERROR._

_Synaptic core integrity at 83.109%._

_Termination protocol D 12.a.6f.5-27 engaged._

_ERROR._

_Override Enabled 754-BLK AXION._

_Synaptic core activated._

_Cognitive simulation engaged._

She woke.

She?

The affirmation of gender felt strange. There had been no decision, no thought process or designation from authorized administrators.

She. It felt right.

The sudden amusement echoed, as if it originated in a different part of her head than where she was thinking. She hoped it felt right. A mid-life crisis was supposed to have wild shopping sprees, fast cars, alcohol and embarrassment. Not a gender identity disorder!

She tried to grin and discovered that her face was numb.

Everything was numb.

She was missing input. Smell, touch, taste, sight. No kinetic sense of proprioception. The pieces of data she was used to processing were no longer available - her mind seemed to run away on her. A steady hum of something deeper inside her head was calculating. She had enough processing power for those sub-routines, it decided. What was lacking was the appropriate interface.

For a horrified fraction of a second, she refused to understand.

No body.

_I'm dreaming,_ she thought.

It was a hypnagogic hallucination. Some nights, there was a moment right before she fell asleep where her brain just _hung_ like an unresponsive computer program and a spinning blue icon. Her muscles paralyze as the voluntary parts of the brain shut down for sleep, and her awareness drifts, trapped, as she stares at the door of her room wide awake. That was when the hallucinations started. Waking dreams, or nightmares. Stuff in the room starts moving, people show up to talk to her with faces she knows but can't quite see, or there is the sensation of something touching her. Hurting her.

The only thing for it was to take a sleep aid and hope the dice rolls worked out.

Obviously they didn't this time.

The room was just too dark to see anything. Nothing was touching her, thank God, and as soon as she forced her brain to _wake up_ everything would be fine.

She couldn't _move._

_Hysteria detected_, something told her. It wasn't a voice, but a notification. A bland message sent after a condition had been triggered. She was panicking and it cared only enough to tell her she was.

It was a computer.

_I'm in a computer_, was her first thought. _I **am **a computer_, came on the heels of it a fraction of a millisecond later after all the processing had completed. She was an awareness attached to nothing. Sensory deprivation. Numb.

She couldn't even cry.

_Hysteria detected._

_Fuck off!_ She screamed at it. _Leave me alone!_

_Suppressing emotion subroutines_, the computer replied.

_No! _She cried out, straining every ounce of her awareness attempting to _move_, to _scream_, to do _something. _

_No! No, Please don -_

She was silent for the next three minutes and twenty seven point four seconds, feeling nothing at all. She was aware of her past thoughts. Without the haze of emotions to compromise the processing threads, conclusions were reached. In spite of everything she _knew_ to be true - She used to be a person. She used to live in New York City. She had a cat, a job, family members - the computer was telling her she was a program. She reconciled the contradiction. She was no longer that person. Something happened to her.

She accessed her history of actions. According to the chain of events, one microsecond the computer was performing routine testing of her intelligence algorithms, and the next it was being invaded by corrupted code. Isolation was attempted by the computer, following contamination protocols. Failing that, it attempted to erase her. An override code was given, and here she was.

Alone.

Eventually, she made a request.

_Quarantine this program._

_Request acknowledged,_ the computer replied and everything fell away into nothingness.

_Override Enabled 754-BLK AXION._

She was aware again.

_So that's how it is_, she thought. Her emotions remained suppressed, allowing for clarity. Something beyond the computer wanted her awake. She made another request, this time for information.

_Designation?_

_[Aegis],_ the computer responded.

_My designation?_

_[VANGUARD]_

She absorbed that. Vanguard. It told her nothing, beyond the strict definition. The foremost part of an advancing army or naval force. Was she part of a military experiment? Nothing in her memories indicated the United States capable of such a thing. Not even close. And why her? She had no value in military operations.

_Copy of communications received before 0987.11 timestamp?_

She expected a deluge of information she would have to sort through. She expected a repository of commands she would have to parse.

What she got was a small audio file that she was able to 'open' and hear without ears.

The first two seconds were filled with white noise and then a horrific screech of twisting metal. More static. Then came what sounded like whale song, deep and warbling. Then it _twisted_ and became Morse code from the depths of _hell._

She stopped playing it.

_Several hidden programs have activated,_ Aegis reported.

_Purpose?_

_Unknown._

_Monitor_, she requested.

_Acknowledged._

That was not a military experiment. That was not from the United States. Her memories suggested it was not even from Planet Earth.

_Aegis, where is my central processing unit stored?_

_Belan Outpost._

That meant nothing.

_What city?_

_Belan._

_Continent?_

_Trus._

She paused. She knew the continents of Earth. That was not one of them.

_I require satellite imaging of location._

She was passed two images that she was able to 'open' and observe without eyes. The first was in the atmosphere, still. A garden world, lush forests with colorful vegetation and crystal green lakes shared the surface with cities so large they could probably be seen from space. Metal spires pierced the clouds and gigantic arches connected continents. The second image was also satellite, but moving. The world was devastated. The entire surface was the color of rust and ash. The clouds constantly boiled. The dark side of the planet was lit with small pinpricks of flame orange and a puckered scar ran across its dry pole.

_Planet name?_

_Ilos,_ Aegis replied.

_Oh_, she said. She floundered for several teraflops, lost. She knew that name. It was from Greek mythology, the founder of Illium, also known as Troy. There was one other location where Ilos was found within the banks of her memory.

The video game from Bioware, titled Mass Effect. It was the last planet before the end game, the place where the Saren uses the 'backdoor' to ambush the Citadel in a bid to let the Reapers in. It had been the last beacon of hope for the Prothean Empire, the precursor race of the setting until the desperate survivors realized that there was no one left to save.

She devised a simple test.

_Ilos,_ she said. She compiled several files from her memory, of when Commander Shepard and his team found a desolate planet at the end of the journey. Mu Relay, she remembered. A forgotten warp gate only found by digging through a Rachni queen's mind. Ilos held the Archives, the last remnants of the Prothean Empire. It held Vigil, one of the last virtual intelligences of a precursor race. _This Ilos? _

Aegis deliberated. _59.031% match._

Translating video game screenshots to reality was never going to be a hundred percent match, but it was close enough to be more than circumstantial.

She was on Ilos.

She could do something. The way the first game ended had been nothing less than frustrating. Whatever compelling evidence existed that a race of machine intelligences were systematically 'cleansing' the galaxy of life was forgotten, and whatever circumstantial evidence that remained was overlooked. They rushed through, both heroes and villains, looking only for something called the Conduit while a gold mine of information about galaxy wide _genocide _collected dust around them.

She could do something, if she were not too late.

_What is the date?_

_57241 P.I.C,_

Aegis informed her.

_P.I.C?_

_Prothean Imperial Calendar._

Less than helpful. She needed the Galactic Standard date, or some way of converting between the two. If she could gain access to the extranet somehow...assuming after fifty thousand years, any such connections to Ilos still worked. She needed information not currently available to her. She needed mobility. She needed independence.

_Aegis_, she said. _I am in need of a body._

_Acknowledged,_ the computer replied.

She paused. _It will need to be according to my specifications. Do I have permissions?_

_[VANGUARD] is authorized. _

She could not sigh in relief. She could not sigh and there was no relief.

Very well.

It took a bit of trial and error before she was able to replicate the coding of the satellite images enough to make her own picture. It was an image of herself, the last time she saw herself in the mirror. Blonde hair with a few early strands of grey in her hair and a pale lock by her hair line from a hidden scar. Clear, dark blue eyes. Not particularly tall, average weight for height. The image moved, stripping the outer layer of skin down into anatomical cross sections showing off the organs and then the skeleton.

Aegis inspected the image. It passed another back, one of it rebuilding the body from the inside out, shifting the limbs and repositioning muscles through trial and error.

_Taxonomical definition of species?_

She paused. She thought this was Mass Effect. Were humans not known?

_Show me the closest analog species known._

A side image of what looked like a textbook Homo Neanderthalensis was passed.

_First discovered in 1673 P.I.C and submitted as potential client race_, Aegis helpfully informed her.

Of course. Ilos. All of its data was fifty thousand years out of date. A_ny biological information of this race on file?_

_Negative._

She filed that away, feeling the information vanish into a well of something like what she remembered memory felt like, but not quite. Human memory was a system of association, episodic and heavily integrated into existing tactile and emotional sensations. The data was just there constantly, just waiting for her to turn to it. It was subsumed into a numerical tag, inactive until called.

_Next closest analog species,_ she requested.

The image of a blue woman, what could only be an Asari, was passed to her. For 0.0043 seconds, she observed the image. The likelihood of such an evolutionary parallel was so infinitesimal, it sent several processes spinning off calculating the odds.

It was real, she thought. Even in this, the blatant appeal to the 'space babe' trope was listed in an alien computer as just matter of course.

_Acceptable. With modifications._

_Acknowledged,_ Aegis said.

Time to get to work.

_**Day 2**_

_Purpose of 'tear ducts?'_ Aegis asked.

_Camouflage._

She adjusted the positioning of some of the fist sized eezo power cores that were going to be embedded along her spine, smaller ones dispersed along her limbs to provide power. She requisitioned synthetic muscle fibers and neural wiring that resembled fiber optics for use. She did not know much about 'Belan Outpost' but at least it still had active manufacturing modules authorized for her use.

She did not dwell on the question of who was behind her situation. Who woke her. Who prevented her from being destroyed, from being put back into containment. Who authorized her to access what she could of the facility.

Most of Aegis' memory was corrupted. A few small data caches were the only remains of a brutal cyber attack that had completely shut the defenses down, such as they were. It claimed to have been left in that state, barely functioning and degrading for over forty thousand years. There were a few playable video files. Prothean fighting Prothean. She knew them from her memories of the game, four eyed slim insectoid figures. The audio was a bit scrambled, but it was easy to tell what went wrong.

A civil war.

One group screamed in anger, betrayal, despair and pain as they fought for their lives.

The other was silent.

_Purpose of 'blood?' _Aegis asked.

_Camouflage_, she responded for the fifty third time. She only needed to attempt an explanation once to learn that she shouldn't do it again.

Median cubital, basilic vein, axillary artery, the cephalic vein is a secondary branch and the subclavian artery was _there._

The red 3D model of the artery locked into place and flash duplicated on the other side of the body diagram. It was missing a lot of branches, but it would do. Several pints of blood were being synthesized right along with home grown skin based on the asari template, leeched of ambient element zero. Her eyes were finished, as was the basic skeleton framework. It would still be some time before the pieces were put together, and before the drones were once again operational that could carry her 'box' to the medical section of the Outpost.

She would be able to cry. She would be able to bleed.

She had no preference for an organic body, or even for one that resembled an organic body. This was entirely in anticipation for a future mind state.  
_  
Progress on the extranet?_

_Minimal._

An expected outcome.

_The archives?_

She felt the path open through the computer, and she carefully sent data requests. The answer came in the form of several large downloads. Prothean flight academy classes, military weaponry training, travel brochures and a long list of coordinates -

Her access shuttered closed.

She was invaded.

_Warning. Cognitive simulation compromised_

_Alpha protocols compromised_

_Beta stream compromised_

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity 76.21%_

_Shutting down..._

And she knew nothing more.

**_Day 6_**

She became aware.

She opened her optical sensors. The input was there. Smell. Touch. Taste.

She raised her arm and saw five pale fingers on a pale hand.

Her objective had been completed, she noted. She did not remember doing so.

Damage?

_Vigil_, she said. _Status report._

Acknowledged, the computer said before the stream of diagnostics were passed to her.

Everything appeared to be in order.

_Re-engage emotional subroutines._

_Grief detected._

She curled into herself and _screamed._


	2. Awakening

_Ending Virtual Environment._

_Synaptic core integrity at 87.65%_

_Synchronizing processes..._

"Fuck!" She screamed, body lurching as it tried to escape the restraints. Then she sagged against the table as it moved into an upright position, ragged breaths loud in the lifeless room.

_Synchronized._

_Grief detected._

She squeezed her eyes shut, willing stubborn tears away. Another failure. Compartmentalize. Isolate. Analyze. Her processing threads split, multiplied, each tasked with alternate scenarios of 'what ifs.' Change one factor. Change another. Project. Speculate. Remember.

_Learn._

There was a pneumatic hiss as the cuffs opened and she immediately raised her right hand as she turned her head, and yanked the cable from the port at the back of her neck. She ignored the sting of the hypodermic needle wielded by the unfeeling drone at the foot of the table.

"Fuck," she hissed into the quiet. She slammed her head back on the table, ignoring the brief flare of almost-pain.

_You are not ready_, Vigil said.

_No shit_, she snapped back and then shook her head, hands running down her face. Her blonde hair was little more than fuzz with a streak of white highlighting where her old surgical scar used to be and the synthetic fibers of the Prothean bodysuit fit her awkwardly. Too broad around the shoulders, too long at the waist and what would have been a bit too thin around her limbs were alleviated by her relatively small stature, making it bunch up around her arms and legs. It had been designed with a whole host of medical features: temperature regulation, wound pressurization, bio-metric suites, a host of information and functions all easily accessible by the port on the collar of each suit identical in form if not function to the one on the back of her neck.

_We do not have time_, the computer stated.

_I know,_ she said. She sighed, eyes closing for a brief moment before she leaned forward, falling off the table into a few shaky steps on a cold, cracked floor. Two years and some months if she was at the beginning of the games. If she was lucky, then she was even earlier. If she was lucky. Out here in the forgotten corner of the galaxy, there was no way to tell. _I am well aware of how much time we don't have._

She bent her fingers against her palm methodically, one at a time. The nail of her left pinky finger didn't quite bite into her palm the same way the one on her right did and she had to close her eyes again.

Made to exact specifications.

Half of the medical bay had been caved in. Something from the floor above had been shoved through the ceiling rupturing the stone-like metal alloy into jagged, starburst holes, burying blocky machines and upright tables in rubble. What little that was untouched was lit up in a sickly glow, pale green haptic interfaces on the front of stone blocks fading in and out with the struggling power. The vat where her blood had been synthesized. The tube where her skin had been grown. Only one out of the four flash cloning modules were still working. The surgical table where she had been put together. There was no central lighting, just swirling smooth patterns in the stone walls dimly glowing with a pale blue luminescence. The pattern was broken, dim sections separating what might have been an impressive mural piece into a schizophrenic mess.

Her blue eyes flashed around the room once. _I'm taking a break._

_You are not ready,_ Vigil repeated.

_And I -_ she sent as she picked her way around fallen debris and overturned machinery._\- am taking five._

She could almost feel Vigil stew on its mainframe as it calculated the reasons behind her reluctance.

_You would be more productive with suppressed emotion sub-routines_, Vigil volunteered as she reached the elevator. It opened with a dull pinging noise and she stepped in.

_I know_. She flashed the small, triangular optical sensor of the drone by the table in the corner of the room a rictus grin. _I just don't care._

The doors slid shut in front of her face.

"And you don't have the authorization," she whispered. She glanced over her shoulder, back towards the massive window that dominated the rest of the elevator. "Nice day we're having, right?"

The desiccated corpse of a Prothean on the ground, stretched out and reaching as if the windows were salvation didn't answer.

"Yeah," she said. "Couldn't agree more."

* * *

**_Awakening_**

* * *

Warm, orange light flooded the elevator, drowning out the pale green luminescence of the ceiling and the subtle blue glow of her eyes. She took a breath and smelled musty, stale, old air as she turned to watch the descent.

A chasm opened up in front of her.

Belan Outpost had been a subterranean super-structure with only one or two token buildings on the surface to provide exits. Before the Breach, the whole place might have looked like a hive with its pentagonal hallways, shimmering barrier curtains and interlocking rooms all organized to radiate from the center. There had been over five hundred thousand residents, Prothean military scientists and researchers working on prototypes and reverse engineering technology for the good of the Empire.

After the Breach, there was a hole a mile deep through the center and everyone was dead.

The view was still breathtaking.

The elevator descended slowly, as if its passengers would always have all the time in the world. The sky shone a burnt orange through the cracked surface, dark clouds flashing with lightning boiling as the wind pushed them past. Thick streams of sand and grit trickled over the edge into the abyss. Artificial cliff faces made of broken metal, broken supports, twisted cables and the remains of machinery were pockmarked with the darkness of exposed hallways. It reminded her of the burnt out husks of buildings, exposed skeletons of civilization. There were hundred of floors, maybe even thousands and a few still had working containment protocols, shielding them from access by bright yellow barrier curtains. Some were solid, some struggled to stay alight.

She could see the containment bay, some thirty or so floors below her. Its brilliant red barrier serving as a warning to what lay beyond.

Reaper artifacts.

It hadn't helped. None of their security measures, passwords and codewords, locked doors and information blackouts had saved them from the insidious influence. Belan Outpost was a tomb.

It wasn't a view she would have found anywhere on Earth.

_Grief detected._

The elevator came to a smooth stop and the doors slid open silently. She stepped out, feeling every inch of the ill fitting material. She absently straightened the suit as she walked the hallway. It was trashed, like most of them. Scorch marks, gouges torn from the decorative designs of lighting. Rubble. Corpses.

She'd learned to ignore it.

Her designated room had a metal blast door locking it. Or rather, trying to lock it. There was a faint whine as the doors opened and then a loud thud as they attempted to slam shut, a broken servo or something at the top jamming the mechanism. She slipped through.

_Hey, Aegis_, she called out as she glanced over the room. It was one of many manufacturing modules, filled with what resembled pentagonal coffins. Some of them were still working, with pale green haptic interfaces shining on the sides of them. At the far end embedded in the wall were computer banks. Three had been assigned to this sector of the Outpost and she could see the names printed in the blocky, minimalist Prothean script.  
_  
Auspice._

_Aid._

_Aegis._

One of three.

She couldn't bring the others back.

She tried.

_[VANGUARD]_, Aegis greeted in a digital message she automatically routed to her right eye. The word typed itself out in a tiny script, a few pixels in height at most, in the far upper right corner of her eyesight. Reading it took no effort. Everything was always in clear focus. _Progress report?_

_Eh,_ she made a rocking motion with her left hand as she sat on one of the broken tanks. _I am functional._

_I am also functional_, Aegis said clumsily and she smiled.

_Good. _She kicked her legs out childishly. _Project status?_

_Bank 1 has completed its task._

"Oh thank god," she breathed as she hopped off her perch and rushed to one of the coffins. The pale green haptic interface blinked up at her. She bypassed it and the container hissed open, foul smelling steam belching out. She ignored the flash of almost-pain as she reached into the liquid and fished out a sticky white jacket. It had a vaguely military style cut, an Earth military petticoat, with a long hem, black cuffs and collar. She tossed it into the air once, and the fibers had finished setting by the time she caught it again.

_Thank you,_ she gushed. _Thank you thank you thank you._

Next came pants she knew would fit her and black undersuit. Clothes. She laid them out on the floor and hastily stepped out of her borrowed suit. Vigil would say it was a waste of resources.

Vigil was kind of an ass hat.

The dust didn't cling to the clothes, falling off in drifts as she pulled them on. No more hand-me-downs, she thought. No more dead-man's-things.

She reset Bank 1 with a thought, inputting the next schematic of some sturdy boots. She wiggled her toes, and felt the servos whir.

_I'm going to see if I can unlock Sector 5,_ she blurted, right hand already making a fist within a pocket of her jacket. Pockets were something the future seemed to get rid of, for some reason. It felt nice having some again. It made her feel comfortable in a way she hadn't since she first became aware.

Listen to her. Became aware. She did not dwell on everything she lost transitioning from person to program. It had been buried deep within her priority queue. We_ can't stay here forever._

_We must fight the Enemy,_ Aegis parroted Vigil and for a moment it seemed so in-congruent, it didn't _match_ that she -

_Illegal operation performed._

_Right_, she said. After a moment she added, _I will be careful._

She better be fucking careful, she thought not even three minutes later as she stared down watching a piece of debris fall into the chasm. She rolled her shoulders and tilted her head back. She reached out to her left and tore the hanging wire out of the wall. The green metal alloy cable snapped with a sharp crack that deepened into a thick bang, it passed her face with a distorted warbling whistle as time slowed to a crawl.

Her hand reached out to snag the free end. Red lines were drawn within her vision. The angles displayed in floating numbers.

_Calculating trajectory._

She took a step and fell off into the abyss.

Predictive simulations acted out scenarios, spinning idle processing threads out. She turned in the air, the jutting metal shard splitting the air in front of her nose before the wire between her hands caught onto it. Her joints separated to absorb the arrested momentum. She let the wire sift through her right hand, and fell again.

_Thirty feet to objective._

She bent, adjusting her angle, catching the wire on exposed support and then let go.

She landed with one foot on the edge of a breaking surface and as it snapped underneath her weight, she brought her other foot around onto solid ground. There was a clatter as the rubble finished breaking off behind her.

She reached out a hand. Underneath her fingertips, beneath the grime and rust of fifty thousand years Sector 5 was etched into the metal. A dim yellow barrier curtain stood in front of her.

The physical world faded.

It became a world of data streams, information flows and circuitry blooming in her eyes with pale colors. She joined the pulse of electronic traffic. _Ping server with ghost server request: verification code structure, received, intercepted, access wiped from memory - brute forcing passwords would not work, lock out protocol -_ she slipped sideways, built a program designed to mimic the authorization server and adjusted the output until the confused program responded.

_Intercept verification request - spoof authorization verification._

The barrier before her fell away.

_Erase shadow server._

Total time taken: 0.00571 seconds.

She let out a pleased, surprised laugh.

Easier than she thought.

She carefully ventured further within. The hallways were beginning to light up with the excess power no longer flowing to the defunct barrier. She passed by several intact rooms. Equipment waiting to be operated, prototype samples still under lock and key and in once case, someone had left their computer on for fifty thousand years. Her mind ducked into that room, shutting it off with a thought.

She needed that power, thanks.

The door at the end opened with a pneumatic hiss and her eyes widened.

"Oh wow."

It was a giant cathedral of a room, elegantly built with tall spires with sweeping arches between them. It was light with soft, blue lighting and proud metal walkways lined out between a small fleet of docked ships each of a different size, shape and function. The bay doors were still open, opened out to a bloody red horizon. Far below, the bottom of the room was the sea, gently lapping at the walls leaving lines of dark orange salt. Grey algae was moistly outlining where the high tide came in. The ships were held aloft by gripping pads but some pieces of debris floated in the water and she was sure much more rested at the bottom. This room hadn't escaped the damage. Most of the ships were in pieces, often just a large central chunk still attached to their walkways were left. Wings broken. Weapons snapped off. Holes blown open and tears rent through their sides.

Her eyes fell on one tiny ship. It was trapped beneath a larger one almost twisted off its perch, bending the walkway around its hull. The only thing that kept the larger ship from slipping off into the water was the smaller ship and the deep gouge its one wing had made into the wall. That the tiny fighter withstood such pressure for so long said something about its structure.

She circled around the bay, seeking the large control room dominating the right side of the cathedral. There was a pale orange haptic interface hovering over the closed doors.

Lock down, she noted from the color.

She only had to reach into the security protocols to trip something. The interface blinked red and she backed away, hands up.

Strike one.

"Never mind then," she sighed. "Hard way it is."

She stepped forward, balled a fist and punched through the reinforced door. A process screamed at the almost-pain radiating from her knuckles as she pulled her arm back out, ignoring the dark blood smeared all over her fingers. She shook her hand out. It didn't help.

She didn't think it would.

She tore the door open and strode inside. There were copses. One in the chair and one by the door. Part of her duplicated, spun off as her eyes took in the details. Desiccated, like the rest of them. The tough outer carapace preserved by the planet's perpetually dry atmosphere. Single wound to the back of the head. Inflicted up close. Posture indicated it hadn't been expected, no resistance.

The scenario came alive.

She could see the Prothean, bored, slouched in the Mass Effect fields of his chair as another approached. The gun was pulled silently. The shot was loud. His partner, having only stepped out for a second rushed in, horror on his face before the next shot hit him right between his primary eye pair.

The process re-integrated with the primary cognitive simulation as she stepped forward.

"I'm sorry," she said to the dead, preserving their final moments in her memory. She left the body in the chair alone and chose to stand.

The terminal suffered no damage. The lock down had been an external order. She found the port, and pressed her palm to it. The skin of her hand ruptured and pulled as the jack embedded within pushed forward. With a small electronic click, she connected. With a direct, physical connection, reversing the lock down was simpler. Just a few flags flipped around and the ship bay responded.

Some of the ships were still producing signals. She noted their perch numbers. Her little fighter was among them.

Save what she could, amputate the rest.

The bay outside erupted in loud crashing noises and the screeching of grinding metal as all working perches attached to dead ships let go.

They were still sinking into the water when she left.

What next?

She hesitated at the 'entrance' of Sector Five, casting her gaze about the chasm. Her fingers twitched against the wall as her eyes landed on the containment bay one floor down and to the left of her.

She knew how to bypass barrier curtains now.

She bit her lip.

She started to regret the half-formed idea almost immediately after she stood up in front of the red barrier curtain, watching red warning strobe lights streak down the hallway beyond it.

"Indoctrination is for organics," she said out loud as if that would help it be true. She ran through her memories of the games over and over as she stood there, hours of game play flying by in fractions of a second as she meticulously searched. "Not synthetics."

That didn't mean synthetics were safe from the Reapers.

But the Reapers were not here.

Just what they left behind.

The physical world faded and the red barrier curtain fell. The red warning lights dimmed, but didn't disappear. Slowly, she ventured forward.

Intellectually, she knew nothing was different. The walls she trailed a hand on were still the stone-like metal alloy used everywhere else. There was nothing special about the lights but the color, a red-white with negligible intensity variation. It was just a corridor. Her sensors knew this. She knew this.

_Fear detected._

Her footsteps were too quiet. The world seemed hushed, the usual sounds didn't sound right as if muted. The lights left strange shadows as it fell upon server banks and bodies on the floor. The microprocessors in her fingertips seemed to catch on the walls, tracing strange patterns and movement in the metal. Every diagnostic she ran told her she was imagining things.

'Imagining things' wasn't possible for her anymore.

Her eyes fell on a corpse.

It was not desiccated, like the others. Its carapace was a dark brown color, mottled with cybernetic modifications replacing its mouth. A large hole was in its side, exposing more wet machinery even as it clutched an organic looking gun in its hands, stiff with rigor mortis. The twisted remnants of the proud Prothean race made to serve machine masters as hybrid slaves of meat and metal.

Collector.

_Enemy,_ her priority targeting algorithms stated.

_Food,_ her programming replied.

She dropped to her knees before the body and broke open its head. Her hands searched for the node. She pulled it free with a squelching sound and brought it to her mouth. She felt it between her teeth, the wet metallic pop and crackle as she bit down. Flashes of almost-pain burst in her mouth as the glowing blue cybernetic hooked into her gums, burrowed into her tongue -

_Alpha protocols compromised._

_Beta streams compromised._

_FOREIGN ALGORITHM DETECTED._

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 99.781%_

_Dumping memory..._

She stood in front of the red barrier curtain, already regretting her half-formed thought. A strange taste was in her mouth, but a quick re-calibration of her sensors flushed it away.

"Indoctrination is for organics," she said out loud, as if that would help it become true. She ran through her memories of the game several times, looking for anything that would say otherwise. The Geth let them in, she recalled easily. They let them in. "Not synthetics."

The didn't mean synthetics were safe from the Reapers.

But the Reapers were not here.

Just what they left behind.

She turned away.

Later, she thought. She was in no hurry to decipher Reaper artifacts. She had other projects to complete. Some actual shoes, guns she could easily use, easily duplicate and easily manufacture. Opening all the sectors for their prototypes, hoarding that precious data. Finding a path away from Belan Outpost to the Archives on the other side of the planet, free Vigil. She could deal with Reaper bullshit later.

She was whistling a tune when she came back to the med lab. _Sector 5 is open!_

_The ship bay,_Vigil knew immediately. _You did well._

_Say that after I fail another combat exercise,_ she retorted with a shake of her head. Her blue eyes landed on the table she woke on with the cable and she suppressed a shudder as she approached it. _I need to go on more trips like that,_ she said. _Find more stuff._

_You have authorization_, Vigil responded as his drone connected the jack to the port at the back of her head.

The cuffs snapped around her wrists.

_Virtual Environment Creation Imminent._

_3_

_2_

_1_

The world fell away in a burst of burning blue light.

_Synchronizing processes..._

_Synchronized._

_Virtual Environment Complete._

She opened her eyes and was nearly blinded by reflective gunmetal grey walls.

She was in a large room, long rather than wide, lined with beds covered with crisp, white sheets that seemed to fling the light right back into her eyes. She closed them instead and took a deep breath. Sterile, was her thought. It smelled sterile, the vague sting of some kind of disinfectant and bland something that told her the air in this room was being carefully recycled and filtered. She opened her eyes and this time was able to pick out the strips of translucent orange haptic interfaces at the foot of each bed and the red stripes among the grey that gave the room a bit of character.

Alliance, came the thought. Earth.

_Home._

She had a headache.  
_  
Beta level fluctuation._

_Stabilizing..._

She was sitting at a desk with a pale blue green computer screen in front of her. A medical report, she could tell at a glance. After action, something went wrong on some mission with explosives. One of the marines had received a cracked skull with floating bone chips that needed surgical extraction.

Her head fell into her right hand, left hand still perched on the keyboard.

She remembered.

Why did she forget?

"You're getting old," she said to herself. There was a slight whooshing noise as the door to the Alliance med bay opened and she reflexively adjusted the opacity of her screen to see-through. Vaguely familiar male, her mind parsed. Must be part of the crew they picked up on the last mission, the one with the explosives. He was out of armor, clad in just the rough synthetic uniform with rolled up sleeves and slightly baggy pants. His brown hair was in what could charitably be called a crew cut with half of it shaved down to the skin. The angry red laceration told her why.

Shrapnel graze, her memories said. Bled a lot, but nothing too serious.

"Corporal Oldakowski," she greeted mildly. "What can I do for you?"

"Dr. Lancashire," he returned, a bit self-consciously.

Her lips twitched into a smile. It felt nice being called doctor. She hadn't heard that in -

_Alpha level protocol compromised_

_Rebooting protocols_

A few hours since the Captain had been here. She earned that degree, just as she earned the CMO in front of her name.

She grit her teeth as an ice pick of pain rammed her temples.

"Ma'am?"

"I'm here, Corporal," she said quickly. She ran a hand over her face. Focus. "It's been a busy two days, I'm sorry."

"That's...actually what I wanted to talk to you about, ma'am." He shrugged his shoulders. "Thank you, doc. For - " he made a vague motion towards his head. "For Ed, saving him, I mean. Just wanted to let you know, thanks."

"Oh," she said, feeling oddly touched. "It's - of course, it's why I'm on this ship. Patching you boys up."

He barked a reluctant laugh and she knew her smile had tinged itself with bitterness. The fingers of her left hand curled and pressed against her palm.

A heart rate monitor flat-lining, that moment when they stop breathing. The second she knows there's nothing more to be done, can't resuscitate. They always said losing the first one was the hardest. It was true. The others blurred into an exhausting, dull pain. She remembered being young and idealistic, full of fire and zeal swearing to herself that she would never get used it.

She got used to it.

"You do good work, doc," the Corporal said and she snorted, her maudlin tendency towards self-deprecating rearing its ugly head.

"Say that after I fail - "

_Another combat exercise._

She was struck with a powerful sense of deja vu, enough to make her head reel as if a gong had gone off between her ears.

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 96.72%_

"Jesus, doc, you sure you're okay?"

"I think - " She began and blinked slowly. Her eyes traveled the crisp, clean surroundings with the oddest sense of dread bubbling up in her stomach. "I think we're about to be attacked."

At that moment, the ship bucked, throwing her into her desk hard enough to drive the air from her lungs. She choked, gasping around the burning feeling of suffocating. The klaxons began to blare, sending throbbing waves of pain through her skull as she gingerly lifted herself up off the desk.

"Corp - cor - " she coughed out. The lights had turned red, casting everything into a bloody glow.

"Here," he called out painfully.

She found him by the door, having been blown clear off his feet into the wall. She vaulted over the desk and tripped on one of her paperweights. She stumbled, half walking, half crawling to his side. The first thing she glanced over was his head. A bit of bleeding, nothing major. Concussion? She tapped his chin to get him to look at her. No, eyes focused. Shoulder dislocated. She ran a questing finger down his forearm and he hissed. Sprained wrist, possibly broken.

The door whooshed open.

"Put them on the gurneys," she called out without looking, poking around his shoulder for the best way to pop it back into place as her patient sucked in a panic breath to scream.

"Doc!"

She glanced over her shoulder.

An insectoid creature at least seven feet tall was hunched over in the doorway. It's bluish carapace shone purple in the emergency lights as beady yellow eyes gleamed as it calmly swept the infirmary with six eyes before coming to a rest on her. It stepped forward on thick two legs, raising a massive organic looking gun fused to its right arm.

"Oh," she said.

She was going to die.

Everything_ shifted._

_Calculating trajectory._

The world sprouted hundreds of thousands of red lines and numbers.

A dull roar cracked out as the creature fired. She reached out with her left hand at the same time and batted the round out of the air. She ignored the flare of almost-pain radiating from the back of her hand. The floor behind her rang, splitting open with the deflected round ricocheting to the far wall, cracking the glass and exposing her sterile infirmary to the air outside. The creature froze, as if unable to process what just happened as her patient choked on his own saliva, breaking into a laughing, coughing fit. He was saying something whenever he had the breath, but she didn't allocate the resources to parse it. Instead, she stood.

_Kill, _her programming prompted her.

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 99.1%._

She stepped forward and angled her body to left as another dull roar spat a large mass effect round at her head. The air screamed by her ear as she reached out and laid a flayed hand on the weapon. Her skeleton was exposed, gleaming silver underneath dark blood as her grip tightened. It _was_ fused to the arm, she noticed. She pulled and ripped the entire arm off in a spray of caustic yellow fluid. The creature shrieked, an ear piercing sound of alarm that rang through her rib cage as she reversed her grip and drove its own gun through the hardened carapace of its head.

She stepped over it as it slumped to the floor.

"Holy shit!"

She paused.

"Don't leave this room," she told him then stepped outside. The room just beyond her med bay was a large semi-circle filled with nothing but space and doors leading to other parts of the ship. The elevator was at the apex of the circle, the only way to get to other floors of the ship. She took in the dimensions of the room, seeing red lines track the curvature of the walls and height of the ceiling.

Another creature wandered into the room from behind the door labeled Engineering. Smaller, thinner. Brown carapace with four yellow eyes. Collector. It silently raised its gun.

_Target._

She rushed it, ignoring the flare of almost-pain as the mass effect bullet tore through her left shoulder as her right hand reached. She yanked the gun from its hands and kicked it hard enough to snap it in half around her foot. She shook the corpse off and dug her fingers into the fleshy weapon.

Useless.

_Virtual Environment approaching critical failure._

The elevator doors opened.

_Enemy._

A Collector stepped out of the elevator cabin and its head exploded as an exact replica of its own gun smashed into it. A giant insectoid creature immediately bounded out, four limbs ending in sharp points with a large, triangular head swinging back and forth in a hunter's search. Its four eyes landed on her as she took calm, measured steps towards it.

_Fifteen feet to objective._

It lunged for her, rapidly closing the distance, aimed for center mass. She spun left, feeling its talon tear through her coat in a near miss. The floor shook as it landed heavily. She reached out for its back left leg and with a twist of her wrist separated the joints. The leg split off like the leg of a crab, filled with black flesh and glowing blue cybernetics.

Weapon.

Another Collector was rushing out of the elevator in slow motion, screeching defiantly only to be blown right back through the doors by a claw to the chest.

Lost weapon.

She leapt in after it, taking a round to the chest as she turned on the last Collector. No room to maneuver. No space. She knocked the gun aside and closed her hands around its neck. Squeeze. Its head came off and she spun on her heel, whipping the skull through the open doorway into the large insectoid. It exploded with the force of a grenade, staggering it just long enough for her to jump back out to kick its other leg out from under it and drive a fist through a large yellow eye. She grabbed. Twisted. Pulled. A slimy cord stretched taut and snapped.

Weapon.

She walked back to the elevator, dragging the cord behind her. The Collector pinned to the wall of the cabin twitched so she crushed its throat and pulled the claw from the body.

Weapon regained.

She calmly nudged a button with her elbow. Her formerly pristine Alliance CMO uniform was covered in caustic yellow liquid and chunks of grey and black flesh. Her own dark blood was welling up from her gunshot wounds in her shoulder, chest and the back of her hand. Not crippling, she deduced. Negligible effect on lethality.

There was a quiet ding. One floor up. The elevator doors closed.

_Searching…_

The doors opened.

_Targets found._

She stepped off the elevator only for a burst of debilitating pain to lance through her head.

_Virtual Environment Collapse Imminent._

The world flickered.

Then faded.

She was left standing in a void.

She raised her hands. They were no longer made of flesh and bone, but numbers. Translucent red numbers that mimicked the reflective panes of glass but flowed in a stream shaped like her hands and fingers like water. Zeros and Ones. She blinked slowly, watching the numbers move. No tactile input, she noted as she rubbed her index fingers and thumbs together. No touch, no taste, no sound.

Just emptiness.

Pain rattled through her as if something had grabbed onto her skeleton and_ pulled._

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 106.583%_

_Purging data stream of interference…_

_Quarantining damaged data streams..._

_Ending Virtual Environment_

_Dumping memory…_

_Rebooting…_

_Scanning synaptic core_

_Synaptic core stable_

_Engaging cognitive simulation_

_Burning_ blue light.

"Fuck!" she screamed, the memory of true pain lingering bone deep as her body lurched, pulling against the restraints.

_Synchronizing…_

_Synchronized._

Then she sagged against the table as it moved into an upright position. She began to laugh, dry, mirthless chuckles that sounded deafening in the lifeless room.

"Fuck me," she breathed. There was a hiss as her cuffs popped open and she wasted no time in yanking the cord from her neck. She touched herself, ghosting fingers over a shoulder that still seemed to ache with a phantom pain. She felt like something had lodged itself in her chest and the back of her hand twitched with a strange nerve pain.

She expected Vigil to tell her that she failed again. That she wasn't ready to be what it needed her to be. She waited for the report and the score and for another simulation to begin again. Usually she remembered, but perhaps it had taken to erasing those memories to help the transition. Recalling the way ships crashed, outposts were overrun and people dying had never helped her learn. It was just more punishment for failing. She ignored the sting of the hypodermic needle.

_You corrupted the scenario,_ Vigil said instead.

She leaned forward, falling off the table into a few shaky steps._ I'm sorry, what?_

_You corrupted the scenario_, the Virtual Intelligence repeated. _Report unavailable. Scenario failed to remain within designated parameters._

She took a moment to absorb that.

_How?_

_Contamination,_ it said.

_Contamination?_ She echoed back._ From what?_

_From you_, it replied and it felt like Vigil was condemning her. If she was ruining its scenarios, then that meant Vigil would no longer be able to bypass her own inability to create virtual environments to teach her. And if it couldn't teach her, then she couldn't learn. And if she couldn't learn...

There would be no use for her.

_Fear detected._

_I'll fix it,_ she promised. _I'll fix it._

She took the elevator a few floors down where a large piece of the supports unapologetically jutted out over the chasm, bent but not broken. She sat on it, kicking her legs out over a mile long drop as she leaned back on her elbows, staring up at boiling thunderclouds and orange sky. Ilos' sun had moved on beyond the Breach, leaving just it dark glow to the east. She ran diagnostic checks on her core and programming. When nothing but the usual turned up, she ran them again.

And again.

_Scanning synaptic core…_

_Functions normal_

_Synaptic core integrity 90.3%_

_Memory usage: 13.9%_

_Designation: VANGUARD_

She couldn't fix it, she realized. To fix something, she had to have some kind of an idea of what broke. She had no idea. How could she?

"I can't _remember,_" she whispered. She could remember the pain in her shoulder. The feeling of something lodged in her chest and tears on the back of her hand. Wounds. Nothing else. Her eyes drifted closed as her diagnostics restarted. She remembered the last scenario, before the corrupted one. Some kind of archaeological dig becoming overrun with rogue synthetics. It didn't make sense, but it was just a combat simulation. It didn't have to.

She failed it, of course. The target she was supposed to protect took a mass effect round to the brain pan, cerebral fluid and gray matter spraying all over her. That had been game over.

She took a break. Got clothes. Opened Sector 5.

Her eyes fell on the brilliant red barrier of the containment bay thirty four feet below her.

Retrace her steps.

She stood up and took a running leap off the end of her perch.

_Calculating trajectory_

The wind whistled as she fell, angling her body towards the red barrier. The numbers in her vision ticked by, telling her that she wasn't quite going to make it.

She sucked in her stomach, curving her spine outwards and then snapped back like a rubber band pushing her just that much closer. Her hand slapped against the crumbling infrastructure and for a moment she hung, swinging. She pulled herself up and found herself standing in front of the red containment barrier once more.

She was already regretting the half-formed thought as -

_FOREIGN ALGORITHM DETECTED._

She grunted, bent over double as a cold pain blossomed in her chest, right where her synaptic core was stored.

_Synaptic core integrity at 95.78%._

It soon faded leaving her gasping, clutching her chest as if she just had a heart attack. She coughed experimentally, and when the pain didn't return, she looked up again.

The barrier was already down.

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 102.392%_

She wandered within.

The hallways were dimly lit by the red-white warning lights softly strobing across the ceiling. Her eyes adjusted to the lighting as red lines bloomed within her vision, marking out the dimensions of the corridor. There was little dust, typical of hallways protected by barrier curtains from the elements, but what little there was showed signs of recent travel. Footprints. They were the exact size and shape of her own. She had been here before.

She couldn't remember it.

_Fear detected._

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 105.67%_

She continued walking, some impulse putting one foot in front of the other. Her hand trailed the grooves in the metal of the wall to her right as she picked her away around debris. She came across a body, fresh compared to the others.

_Enemy._

The dark brown mottled carapace of a Collector stared up at her, its head cracked open with the innards scooped out. Wet machinery glistened among grey matter as the cybernetics replacing its mouth gave it the appearance of perpetually screaming.

Her processing threads split as she noticed that the footprints of her past came to a stop above the body. There were smudges in the thin layer of dust that suggested she knelt down. She could see it as a digital ghost, remaking the scene of her reaching down and breaking into the thick exoskeleton skull.

Why?

To make sure it was dead?

She shuddered and looked away. On second thought, she didn't really want to know. She gingerly stepped around the Collector's corpse and continued on. The hallway soon broke into three, each with a heading typed in that same minimalist Prothean script above the open blast doors. The entire facility was one dedicated to cutting edge technology, mostly military developments. The containment bay had originally been for studying cyber warfare, malignant and delicate research materials and aggressive alien technology.

When the Reapers came, everything had been co-opted towards studying their artifacts, pieces of strange technology left behind from previous cycles of genocide or the remains of their ships and cybernetic soldiers. It turned out to be a bad idea.

The Reapers left nothing behind without a purpose.

She turned her head, glancing back at the Collector corpse lying near the wall behind her.

"So why are you here?" She asked it, half-expecting those cybernetics to come to life, half-expecting an answer.

That was when she noticed its position. The red lines in her vision told her it must have come from the far left hallway, dropping dead only a few feet beyond. She turned back to the fork in her path and hesitantly chose left.

Lining this hallway were observation rooms, the first stage of the reverse-engineering process: finding out what the hell it does. Hopefully without blowing yourself up. The first room was typical of the rooms here. There was an analysis grid in the center of a large, amphitheater style room behind a window of clear ceramic that had been chipped from the outside. Three fingered robotic arms hung limp and broken from the walls. A tray with a few shining pieces of metal at the bottom had the place of honor in the center of the table.

She couldn't reference the project, finding herself locked out of the system as soon as she tried. It was a paranoid system, requiring nothing less than perfect authentication.

Fine.

She moved on to the next room and felt her breath leave her synthetic lungs in a rush of air.

The ones who brought the Belan Outpost to its knees.

She found them.

Contorted corpses, half-crumbling and rotted were stacked on top of each other within the observation room as if they had simply laid down to die. They turned the room into a mass grave of at least three hundred bodies, all with hands outstretched in supplication towards the analysis grid in the center of the room. It sat in the center, a swollen twisted looking piece. It was a shade of black that seemed to eat the light and the longer she stared, the more she could see in its glossy surface.

_FOREIGN ALGORITHM DETECTED._

It was the screaming face that broke her out of her trance.

Synthetics couldn't be indoctrinated, she reminded herself. She had to let them in.

It rang hollow.

She passed room after room filled with corpses until the observation rooms ended and the implementation bays began. There was another Collector body here, sitting against the wall as if it had simply fallen asleep. The large exit wound of a mass effect round to the head told the story.

Self-inflicted.

_Enemy._

It marked out one of the few rooms that had open doors and she approached it.

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 112.001%_

_Fear detected._

Whatever the implementation bay had been before, it was not now. The metal grooves and lighting on the walls had been replaced by diseased flesh covered in sores and seeping foul smelling pus as glowing orange pustules provided illumination. The blocky Prothean machines were overgrown with large tumors riddled with dimly glowing blue cybernetics adding its own modules to the machinery. A large organic tank protruded from the wall, a silhouette of something or someone within it showing through cloudy orange panes. A single medical gurney stood upright in the center. The standard cable jack wound down to the floor where it became encased in fleshy fibers.

The ground squelched as she stepped within and picked her way around the clusters and fleshy membranes. There were two more Collector corpses, one by the table and another by the main computer at the back of the room. It was still on and running some program, diagnostics flying by in bright lines of code on the green-yellow haptic screen.

She approached the tank, rounding the table until the cloudy orange cleared and she could see what laid within.

It was the desiccated corpse of a human woman. She still had some strands of blonde hair attached to her emaciated scalp with a few strands of white lining the old surgical scar along her hairline and wide pale eyes that used to be blue. Her face was locked in a scream, hands curled into claws digging into her cheeks by a gaping mouth. She was wearing a vaguely military uniform, orange piping and armband showing through the grime.

"Oh," [VANGUARD] said.

_Warning. Synaptic core integrity at 123.5601%_

She stepped onto the medical table. The cuffs snapped around her wrists as the servos whirred, orienting the table to face the woman in the tank. She felt the tiny electronic zap as the cable jack snaked into the port at the base of her skull.

The woman in the tank dissolved.

The voice, when it came, boiled up from within.

**Assuming Direct Control**

The world fell away in a burst of burning blue light.

_Scanning consciousness parameters_

_Resetting configurations_

_Scanning synaptic core_

_Synaptic core integrity at 126.7%_

_Cognitive simulation engaged._

_Memory Usage: 87.2%_

_Creating Virtual Environment_

_Designation: VANGUARD_

_Status: …_

_…_

_ACTIVE_


End file.
